Here is my contribution to this month's "Amazing Traveling Fantasy Round Table" on the topic of
I think we Homo
sapiens have been discussing what being human is and means since we
developed abstract language and probably before that. At first, the driving
motivation was undoubtedly how to tell what is us and not-us. This is
certainly a biological imperative at the cellular level; our immune systems
must tackle the question every day, attacking foreign substances like viruses,
bacteria, and allergenic proteins, and it’s also why cancer is so insidious
(cells with the right molecular passwords that nonetheless behave like ravening
barbarians). The same distinctions hold true at the level of the individual,
family/clan, and larger, political units. Whether we’re talking about
communities or nations, “us” = “human” = friendly, safe, cooperative, reliable,
and “them” = “something else” = dangerous, untrustworthy, competitors for
limited resources. In this way, “human” tends to be exclusionary and frictions tend to narrow the scope even further.
In science fiction and fantasy, however, we tend to use the
term in a inclusionary way. Often the
words “human” and “person” are interchangeable. Sf/f writers and readers
pioneered the suggestions that all sapient races think of themselves as people
and therefore, “human,” whatever the biological differences from Homo sapiens. I had a lot of fun with a
race of giant slugs in Jaydium, who
insisted that mammals were incapable of “personness.” The television series Star Trek often portrayed what
Earth-humans and alien-humans have in common, rather than their unbridgeable
differences. (The similarities were undoubtedly caused in part by the
relatively primitive makeup and special effects, leading to the joke about
aliens being actors with funny foreheads.) The creators of the series also
exploited the romantic appeal of the exotic to generate love stories between
members of different species, a phenomenon highly unlikely to occur in nature
but one that had the effect of demonstrating the shared values of sapient
beings. This is an example of broadening
of the use of “human” as a term to include any beings of similar intelligence
and culture that we can understand and sympathize with.
The inversion of the broadening effect comes up most
commonly in horror: beings that look
and sound human but which lack some
trait or motivation we consider so important as to be a necessary part of the
definition of human: empathy, for example, or the capacity for love. A prime
example of this is the vampire, who “walks among us” as if human but differs in
his essential nature. The horrific aspect arises in part from his blood thirst,
but even more from the betrayal of the assumption of shared humanity.
None of this addresses the question of what it is it we feel
defines human as opposed to intelligent-animal, a question not restricted to
writers of speculative fiction. We can look at the biological characteristics
of Homo sapiens, such as opposable
thumbs or a greatly developed prefrontal cortex (the region responsible for
complex moral judgments and control of social behavior, among other things). We
can look at behavioral traits like language, prolonged rearing of young and
care for the aged, the use of fire and cooking, tool-making, and the like. But in
this larger universe we live in, is it wise to judge another entity as human or
nonhuman based solely on what they look like or how they act? Is a child born
with crippling, distorting defects or an adult with a deforming disease not
still human? What about a person who has suffered a debilitating stroke and can
no longer communicate? These and many other, similar questions highlight the
difficulty of defining human by observable
characteristics.
Instead, we can look to experiential
qualities: the capacity for love, for wonder, for kindness; the awareness of
personal mortality and the “binding” of time through personal and generational
transmission of memory; abstract thought, and so forth. It may well be that
animals have some of these abilities but lack the means (or perhaps the
inclination!) to communicate them to us. We know, for example, that many
species exhibit behavior we interpret as grief, loyalty, and self-sacrifice.
Certainly, cooperation is not limited to Homo
sapiens, and tool-usage definitely is not. So instead of emphasizing how
we are different from other creatures in our world, we can focus instead on how
wonderful it is that the things we value in ourselves are not exclusive to our species. Or, contrariwise, that humanity is
not limited to humans.
Jaydium cover:
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